from the Joseph Naik Vaz Institute, http://www.josephnaikvaz.org

Monday April 25th, 2022 Sri Lankan Mass  for Victims of Easter Sunday bombings of 2019 at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican will be transmitted live on  Youtube and Vatican link.  Please share.
https://www.vaticannews.va/en.html

Pope Francis will bless the families of Easter Sunday victims at a Mass at St Peter’s basilica. He arranged for Cardinal Ranjith of Sri Lanka to bring some of those maimed in these attacks for this Sri Lankan Mass in Rome.  He is also scheduled to hold discussions about the unsolved mystery of these bombings.

April 21st is the 371st Anniversary of the birth of St. Joseph Vaz (1651-1711) in Benaulim, Goa. 
April 21st  is also the 3rd Anniversary of the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings in Colombo in which many Sri Lankan Catholics, descendants of the many Catholic converts that St. Joseph Vaz made,  lost their lives, were maimed or lost their limbs.   Please pray with the Pope and Sri Lankans for those victims.

We invite all devotees and admirers of this great Indian-Sri Lankan saint, St. Joseph Vaz,  to remember that he laid his life on the line to work under persecution to win back religious freedom for the descendants of Sri Lankan Catholic converts in Sri Lanka. St. Joseph Vaz, ordained a priest in Goa, offered to go to Sri Lanka under disguise to minister to the abandoned Catholics under persecution.  He lived and worked there for twenty-three years, walking barefoot and escaping capture by the Dutch who had banned the practice of the Catholic faith and all priests from entering Sri Lanka.  Through his arduous labors and courageous resistance, he built up an underground church, even underground schools, and a Catholic community that has survived to the present day.  The Sri Lankan Catholic community that he successfully founded and the country of Sri Lanka hosted the Pope’s official visit to Sri Lanka in 2015 to canonize him as Goa, Kanara (Mangalore region) where he also re-built Catholic missions and schools destroyed by the Dutch, and Sri Lanka’s first canonized Saint.  

St. Joseph Vaz presented a Petition for freedom of religion to the Dutch anti-Catholic government of Sri Lanka in 1706 at the risk of his life.  He will always remain a symbol of hope and inspiration for all those who suffer persecution and are standing up for freedom of religion. We invite all those who are working for human rights and social justice to join us in celebrating his saintly life at our annual Feast Day Mass in January and help make him better known as a model of service to humanity.
For more information, please visit our website http://www.josephnaikvaz.org

Thank you.

Joseph Naik Vaz Institute, California, USA